TPAC Supports Weather@Home Project

Any Australian with a home computer and an internet connection can now power up a climate model and help scientists find the causes of record high temperatures and drought that hit Australia and New Zealand in 2013.

The online climate experiment, Weather@Home has been created by a group of scientists from the University of Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of Oxford, the UK Met Office, the University of Tasmania, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in NZ.

By signing up to Weather@Home, computer users can create climate model simulations that produce 3D representations of weather for 2013. They can watch these evolve in real time or let them run quietly in the background.

TPAC is currently hosting the services that home computers communicate with; It will provide new data for thousands of home users for processing, as well as provide services to store the resulting simulations from home computers.

TPAC with funding provided by Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) will store the processed simulations for use by the research community and could be used to assess the possible role of climate change in Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, the record rain events in New Zealand in 2011 and the record rain events in eastern Australia in 2010 and 2011.